[MSN] Finding the fakes and forgeries

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Finding the fakes and forgeries
When it comes to old wares it's a question of determining what's real and what's not writes Antony Davies
25oct06

SHOPPING for antiques and fine art can be rewarding from the perspectives of both investment and personal interest. But as prices rise so does competition for your money.

Supply is fixed and nothing is going to change that. There has always been the incentive to provide goods for which there is a strong demand but short supply, because it's easy selling and the profits can be substantial.

With potential easy sales and high profits comes the temptation to sell imitations of the real thing, which nearly always cost less but can be extremely hard to detect.

As collectors find alternatives and ever more specialised areas to buy in, there are those who will take advantage of scant knowledge, few published references and wishful thinking to produce imitations, copies and out-and-out fakes.

You might think it's much ado about nothing, but international art and antique fraud is alive and well. It's present in collecting areas as diverse as plastic Smurf figures and old masters' paintings.

Fakes and forgeries pervade markets as open as eBay, as local as regional collectors' fairs and as pretentious as Sotheby's.

A Canberra company has completed a comprehensive study into faking in the art and antiques market, with some good advice for collectors and investors as well as dealers, auctioneers and institutions.

The study covers international trade in art, antiques and antiquities, and looks at the history of forging over a 2000-year period.

Caslon Analytics (www.caslon.com.au) is an Australian internet research, analysis and strategies consultancy. Employees have academic backgrounds and are interested in "the economics of culture", particularly as it relates to the online community.

That means they look at the way we buy and sell over the internet, and how electronic mediums have affected the propriety of this trade.

To get there, Caslon looked at traditional selling methods, and how people have dealt dishonestly over several centuries.

Translated to internet businesses, this should give them a head start for ensuring better security and moral behaviour in arenas like eBay.

Caslon Analytics director Bruce Arnold says: "We're interested in the intersection of trade, from popular culture to new technologies. It involves intellectual property, moral rights and security on and off the net.

"And there's a professional interest in the discussion of art forgery as a part of the economics of culture."

Caslon points out that the art of forging is as old as trade itself.

The earliest reference it quotes is the 300AD forgery of a letter from Jesus Christ to Abgar of Edessa. No doubt in religious history there have been many others.

Also mentioned is the 1353AD discovery of the Shroud of Turin in France.

This was only recently debunked as a fake of about that period, but it has been successful in drawing tourists to Turin for more than 650 years, despite being described as a cunning fraud as early as 1389 by the Bishop of Troyes.

In 1653, Luca Giordano forged a work, purported to be by Durer, titled Christ Healing the Cripple. Thomas Chatterton's Rowley forgery of 1769 and the 1780 discovery of the "will" of Shakespeare's father by John Jordan are quoted as 18th century examples.

The 19th century was even richer for fakes, and saw Thomas Wainewright convicted of forgery in 1837.

There was also the scandalous forgery case of Alexander Humphrys; a faked discovery in 1852 by John Payne Collier of an annotated second folio of Shakespeare; papyrus forgeries in 1861 purporting to have been written by Saints Matthew, James and Jude; and the 1873 terracotta fakes accepted by the Louvre as Etruscan.

The list goes on.

Twentieth century forgers were assisted by new technologies and the quick changes in fashion that saw recently-made articles soar in value.

Some were so audacious that in retrospect it's hard to see how they were ever taken seriously, while others represented the exceptional skill, if not the originality, of their authors.

In 1925, talented painter Otto Wacker forged dozens of fake Van Gogh paintings. The following year the involvement of the Hungarian Government in counterfeiting French currency was exposed.

Fritz Kreisler revealed in 1935 that he authored some Vivaldi and Couperin scores.

There have been some lucrative attempts. In 1946, Hans van Meegeren (1889-1947), imprisoned for selling a "Vermeer" painting to Nazi Herman Goering, painted another in his cell as part of his defence.

Van Meegeren concentrated on forgery of Vermeer. His Christ at Emmaus was acclaimed as authentic by art historian Abraham Bredius in 1937 and then sold for the equivalent of $8 million.

Van Meegeren escaped a conviction for collaboration with the Nazis, but got a sentence for forgery and confiscation of proceeds equivalent to $53 million.

Van Meegeren is estimated to have earned up to $79 million in his forging career. Evidently Goering was told that his painting was a forgery while he awaited execution, with a contemporary remarking that he "looked as if for the first time he had discovered there was evil in the world".

More recently, Britain's Sunday Times bought the faked 1967 "Mussolini Diaries", and Elmyr de Hory was exposed as forging valuable works by newly fashionable Dufy, Picasso and Derain.

The Times reported that 24 years after his death, the forgeries of de Hory were so popular in their own right, that fakes of the Modiglianis, Matisses and Picassos with which he duped people in the 1950s and 1960s were themselves being forged.

In a small market like Australia, forgeries present some particular challenges. Few people like to risk losing clients or reputation by sticking their neck out to reveal a fake, even when obvious.

Others are ready and willing to claim that an object is a forgery when it is not, knowing that mud sticks.

It's an easy technique, but abhorrent and morally corrupt, akin to vexatious litigation intended to scare off competitors. The petty rivalries that are a hallmark of the antiques market flow right through the bigger auction houses, to dealers and galleries and market stall holders.

In the 1990s, British auction house Sotheby's suffered a huge blow to its international credibility and reputation as an expert specialist in many areas of art, with the exposure of major international involvement in art smuggling and fraud.

The tarnish was hardly removed by the later claims that half the antiquities brought for sale at Sotheby's in a year are forgeries and that some 25,000 newly forged antiquities enter that market each year.

Further evidence suggests that about 80 per cent of the "ancient" terracottas smuggled since the 1980s have been fakes. The process of "dumbing down" the company with the removal of almost half of its specialist staff internationally in favour of would-be socialites between 1990 and 2000 has done nothing to improve the company's reputation.

The problems exist across the spectrum of collecting categories.

Fakes are often only discovered when they have been bought by experts. The same applies in reverse, of course, and sometimes an object overlooked by people who should know better is later found to be of greater significance by the buyer, who has had more time to study it.

Insights into the market for "old masters" on which the paint is still wet are well documented in Sotheby's: The Inside Story (New York, Random House 1997), by Peter Watson; Sothebys: Bidding for Class (London, Little Brown 1998), by Robert Lacey; and The Art of the Steal: Inside the Sotheby's-Christie's Auction House Scandal (New York, Putnam 2004), by Christopher Mason. Of course, Sotheby's is not alone, but as Caslon points out, it is one of the significant custodians of truth in the industry, and enormous damage is done when even companies of its scale cannot be trusted.

As recently as October 9, The Times reported that fakes of works purporting to be by modernist artist Damien Hirst had been spotted in a Sotheby's sale in London.

In trade outside of commercial galleries and auction houses, it's rare for vendors or buyers to publicise discovery of a forgery. There are few highly publicised cases of forgery, probably because of the embarrassment it can cause.

Sotheby's had to refund around $1.2 million to the Canadian buyer of two supposedly Hepplewhite chairs recently. The company admitted to selling fake furniture after evidence was produced by the Sunday Times.

Four "Georgian" chairs that sold for $3.2 million were exposed as forgeries, and other Sotheby's clients admitted to having found that they had been sold fakes by the company.

"The trade has been pointing out for years the suspicious items of furniture that have been turning up in Sotheby's," said London antiques dealer Michael Hogg.

Perhaps more insidiously, later replicas of modern designs are often resold as genuine works. With classic designs like Carlo Mollino's 1948 trestle table realising $5.03 million and Marc Newson's Lockheed lounge selling for $265,000, cheap replicas are bound to be made.

With just some modest use they quickly acquire a patina of age which can make them look very real to a hopeful or inexpert buyer.

Replicas often "sacrifice quality by omitting particular design features or blurring standards (using glue rather than stitching or dovetailing, paint rather than lacquer, screws rather than brazing)".

Caslon suggests a forensic approach to studying important items to establish authenticity. Looking closely at the materials used will demonstrate whether they in fact existed when the object was supposed to have been made.

Closely referenced studies of provenance can also be critical in deciding whether an object is genuine or not, although of course the majority of collected objects do not come with neat historically recorded mentions to conveniently prove their history.

Some buyers adopt a caveat emptor approach that is broadly endorsed by regulators. As with buying a Renaissance masterpiece on eBay, if it looks too good to be true it usually is, but don't let that stop you. One of the best aspects of collecting is the thrill of the chase, and the chance of finding something that everyone else has missed.

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/